The 10 Best Car Tablet Mounts

We spent 43 hours on research, videography, and editing, to review the top choices for this wiki. If you don't have a GPS system factory installed in your car, there's no need to go to the expense of having one put in. One of these car tablet mounts will enable your tablet or smartphone to show you the way. They also allow passengers to watch videos or surf the Web while you drive, and work great for listening to Internet radio stations and podcasts, too.
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Skip to the best car tablet mount on Amazon.

We spent 43 hours on research, videography, and editing, to review the top choices for this wiki. If you don't have a GPS system factory installed in your car, there's no need to go to the expense of having one put in. One of these car tablet mounts will enable your tablet or smartphone to show you the way. They also allow passengers to watch videos or surf the Web while you drive, and work great for listening to Internet radio stations and podcasts, too.
When users buy our independently chosen editorial picks, we may earn commissions to support our work.
Skip to the best car tablet mount on Amazon.

10. Jarv Seat Mount

Lightweight yet robust, the Jarv Seat Mount will attach to either the seat rail bolt or to the floor, allowing for safe and easy hands-free navigation, calling, audio playing and video chats (while not driving). Note that installing its hardware will leave permanent marks.

9. Jarv Premium

Ideal for vehicles that frequently hold multiple passengers, the Jarv Premium is designed to accommodate marathon road trips. It features an extension arm that positions the tablet conveniently between the two front seats for easy backseat viewing.

8. Apps2Car Stand

Suitable for devices between five and 11 inches in length, the Apps2Car Stand will attach to nearly any vehicle’s CD slot, providing better stability than most air vent or suction cup mounts. It positions the tablet front and center on your dashboard.

7. Satechi Universal

By mounting your tablet or smartphone to the Satechi Universal and positioning it at the center of your dashboard, you’ll create a clear viewing station in your car. Its adjustable arm and ball joint design allow you to achieve the optimal screen angle for your passengers.

6. iKross 2-in-1

Adjustable with a 360-degree swivel ball joint, you can easily set up the proper viewing angle once the iKross 2-in-1 is securely mounted to your cupholder. This convenient model is designed with interchangeable tablet and smartphone mounts.

5. Macally Headrest

Most cars are built with round headrest poles between two and seven inches wide, which will easily accommodate the versatile Macally Headrest. Its sturdy frame can be extended to a wide variety of positions depending on which passenger wants to use the device.

4. TFY Universal

The TFY Universal is a solid choice for families with young children, as its simple detachable design makes it easy for kids to mount and remove the holder on their own. It helps that it features no protruding parts, so the little ones won’t get scratched or pinched.

3. Arkon Seat Rail

A popular model with service vehicles and fleets of delivery trucks, the Arkon Seat Rail is intended for large tablets up to 18.4 inches in screen size. Its spring-loaded design makes it easy to insert or remove the device with one hand.

1. Mobotron Standard

The innovative Mobotron Standard is a bolt-on mounting solution for laptops and tablets that can adjust to any angle you choose. If you’re a frequent traveler and often use your vehicle as a mobile office, this reliable mount may be for you.

Dangerous Screens

According to the national safety council, approximately 1.6 million accidents occur each year due to drivers distracted by cell phones. We're not only talking about texting here, either. Cell phone distraction involves everything from texting and talking, to navigating and operating music players.

When it comes down to it, the danger presented by using a cell phone while driving results from a cumulative time spent not looking at the road, and even with some of the bigger cell phones on the market these days, small screen size means more time squinting down at details and less time focused on the traffic pattern.

As a result, a lot of drivers understandably prefer to use tablets in the car in place of their cell phones. Not only do tablets provide a much larger interface for music and navigation, they also make texting so inconvenient as to keep the driver from bothering with it.

The big problem with tablets, though, is their bigness. They're incredibly difficult to manipulate with one hand, making driving with a tablet a lot more dangerous than driving with a phone. Unless, of course, you have a good mount for your tablet.

The car tablet mounts on our list are designed to work with a variety of tablet sizes, given their spring-loaded holsters, and each hooks into place by means of suction or leverage. The result is a large, well-placed interactive system for your vehicle that should help keep you safe from yourself.

It's All In How You Mount It

Sometimes I go through my days pretending that I'm left-handed. The world is such a different place for lefties. At every turn they're confronted with pieces of technology that are designed and manufactured with the majority demographic of right-handed individuals in mind.

Everything from scissors to watches, from can openers to all the controls of a car are made for manipulation with the right hand. Imagine a left-handed person trying to operate a car's navigation screen that's built into the center console. Their only real option is to use their right hand. The car tablet mounts on this list provide a solution, for the most part, and that solution–as so much of your decision among these holders–lives and dies in the method by which you mount them.

Take our poor lefty for example. If he buys the tablet mount that uses his cup holder for tablet placement and security, he runs into the same conundrum he faces against a center console. This style works fine for a righty, and fortunately for our left-handed friend, it's not the only sort of mount we feature.

The other two styles work by leverage or by suction. Leverage-based tablet mounts use either the slots of your air vents as mounting points, or they use the stems of your head rest to face the tablet toward the back seat. Presumably, there are children back there whom you aim to distract for the duration of the ride.

While leverage-based mounts provide you with a lot of placement options, they can add unhealthy amounts of weight to the simple plastic vents, possibly enough to break them. They also have a greater tenancy to slip out of place from the natural vibrations of the car.

Suction-based mounts provide better security against slippage, but they limit your mounting positions to the front of the car. What's more, if you have an intensely sloping windshield like the ones you can find on late model Honda Civics, your mounting angles are significantly reduced.

Both leverage and suction mounts give you options to place your tablet to the left of the steering wheel, though, so no matter what hand you call your dominant one, you'll have a space from which to work.

Calling all Cars

I remember the hullabaloo leading up to the announcement of the iPad. It seemed through that whole late winter in early 2010 as though Apple was strategically leaking bits of information about their big announcement. By the time of the actual unveiling, the only thing up in the air was exactly what the company would call the device. Plenty of people thought the name chosen was a ridiculous one, but it appears as though Apple got the last laugh.

This release marked the dawn of the tablet age, and a market that hadn't existed before, that hadn't even been identified before, suddenly had to play catch up in the accessory department. By the time third-party manufacturers released enough cases, mounts, styluses, and supports for the first generation iPads, Apple was onto smaller, thinner versions, and their competition had developed imitation machines in every color of the rainbow.

Cell phone mounts of one kind or another have been around since the earliest car phones of the 1940s and 50s. These weren't cell phones, per se, but they allowed a select number of users the ability to make calls from the comfort of their vehicles. These were the only such technologies until cell phones began cropping up in the 1980s.

After the introduction of the tablet into the collective consciousness, there was no way that an end to the development of cases, mounts, and other accessories would be anywhere in sight.

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Sam is a marketing/communications professional and freelance writer who resides in Chicago, IL and is perpetually celebrating the Cubs’ 2016 World Series victory.

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